On Defining Design

“Design is more about observing the world around you, then about personal creativity.”

Cam Shaw

“A man-made thing that produces pleasure (and criticism) by somehow taping into the order of the universe is beautiful. Making beautiful things makes our lives worthwhile. My teacher, and one of the founders of the Pratt industrial design program, Rowena Reed Kostellow, said, "Pure, unadulterated beauty should be the goal of civilization." From a pragmatic point of view, for something to be beautiful, it has to work. In order to make this idea clearer I have combined the ideas of beauty and function into one word: Beautility.”

Tucker Viemeister

“Architecture is the reaching out for the truth.”

Louis Kahn

“Now architecture consists of order, which in Greek is called taxis ... Order is the balanced adjustment of the details of the work separately, and, as to the whole, the arrangement of the proportion with a view to a symmetrical result.”

Vitruvius

“The details are not the details. They make the design.”

Charles Eames, Architect, Graphic and Industrial Designer, Filmmaker

“Design is communication. Great design is rational. Rational design is filtered communication.”

Thierry Loa, Web Designer, Director, Programmer, Producer

“Architecture is really about well-being. I think that people want to feel good in a space... On the one hand it's about shelter, but it's also about pleasure. The intention is to really carve out of a city civic spaces and the more it is accessible to a much larger mass in public and it's about people enjoying that space. That makes life that much better. If you think about housing, education, whether schools and hospitals, these are all very interesting projects because in the way you interpret this special experience.”

Zaha Hadid, Architect

“We are searching for some kind of harmony between two intangibles: a form which we have not yet designed and a context which we cannot properly describe.”

Christopher Alexander

“Design, in its broadest sense, is the enabler of the digital era—it's a process that creates order out of chaos, that renders technology usable to business. Design means being good, not just looking good.”

Clement Mok, Design Business: Multiple Media, Multiple Disciplines

“For design is about the making of things: things that are memorable and have presence in the world of the mind. It makes demand upon our ability both to consolidate information as knowledge and to deploy it imaginatively to creative purpose in the pursuit of fresh in formation.”

Krome Barratt, Logic & Design In Art, Science & Mathmatics

“Designing is not a profession but an attitude. Design has many connotations. It is the organization of materials and processes in the most productive way, in a harmonious balance of all elements necessary for a certain function. It is the intergration of technological, social, and economical requirements, biological necessities, and the psychological effects of materials, shape, color, volume and space. Thinking in relationships.”

“With function, flow, and form as basis, design is evaluated as a process culminating in an entity which intensifies comprehension.”

Ladislav Sutnar, Graphic Designer

“Design is the fundamental creative activity with which we direct our lives, and collectively, the earth's transformation from its original, natural state into our human-made world.”

Michael Shannon

“The essential function of the (design) profession in our society is to enhance and cultivate communications toward: Easier understanding of ideas and complex problems, in the shortest possible time and higher visual and auditory retention of data.”

Will Burtin, Graphic Designer

“In most people's vocabularies, design means veneer. It's interior decorating. It's the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

Steve Jobs, Founder and CEO, Apple

“Design is directed toward human beings. To design is to solve human problems by identifying them, examining alternate solutions to them, choosing and executing the best solution.”

Ivan Chermayeff, Graphic Designer, Founder, Chermayeff & Geismar Inc.

“Design is not making beauty, beauty emerges from selection, affinities, integration, love.”

Louis Kahn, Architect

“Design should do the same thing in everyday life that art does when encountered: amaze us, scare us or delight us, but certainly open us to new worlds within our daily existence.”

“Design is the term we use to describe both the process and the result of giving tangible form to human ideas. Design doesn't just contribute to the quality of life; design, in many ways, now constitutes the quality of life.”

Peter Lawrence, Founder, Corporate Design Foundation

“To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.”

Milton Glaser, Graphic Designer

“Design is a learning experience. So my agenda is to figure out what I want to learn next.”

Ayse Birsel, Industrial Designer and President, Olive1:1

“Design is art that makes itself useful.”

1984 poster for Die Neue Sammlung, design museum, Munich

“Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilized society.”

Walter Gropius, Architect and Founder, Bauhaus (building house)

“Design is a choice.”

Davis Furniture advertisement

“Design is in everything we make, but it's also between those things. It's a mix of craft, science, storytelling, propaganda, and philosophy.”

Erik Adigard

“For me, the concept of design is more than object-oriented; it encompasses the design of processes, systems and institutions as well. Increasingly, we need to think about designing the types of institutions we need to get things done in this rapidly accelerating world.”

John Seely Brown, Chief Scientist, Xerox Corporation

“What is design?... It's where you stand with a foot in two worlds—the world of technology and the world of people and human purposes—and you try to bring the two together.”

“The designer... has a passion for doing something that fits somebody's needs, but that is not just a simple fix. The designer has a dream that goes beyond what exists, rather than fixing what exists... the designer wants to create a solution that fits in a deeper situational or social sense.”

David Kelley, Founder of IDEO (from Terry Winograd's book “Bringing Design to Software”)

“Design is the intentional and altruistic act of sythnesizing a harmonious response to a context. It is neither art, which embeds self, or science, which proclaims problem-solving.”

Hanee Patenaude, Interdisciplinary Designer

“Design is the patterning and planning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end... any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself works, counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life.”

Victor Papanek, Industrial Designer (from his book “Design for the Real World”)

“Design is a field of concern, response, and enquiry as often as decision and consequence... it is convenient to group [design] into three simple categories, though the distinctions are in no way absolute, nor are they always so described: product design (things), environment design (places) and communication design (messages).”

Norman Potter, Furniture and

“Design is more than meets the eye. Design is about communicating benefits. Design is not about designers. Design is not an ocean it's a fishbowl. Design is creating something you believe in.”

“Design is a form of competitive advantage. People tend to think of design as good art, good visual language, which it absolutely has to be. But it's also about the ability to do systems thinking.”

James P. Hackett, President and CEO, Steelcase

“Design is art optimized to meet objectives.”

Shimon Shmueli, Founder of Touch360

“Design is a response to social change.”

George Nelson

On Design Advice

“A modern building should derive its architectural significance solely from the vigour and consequence of its own organic proportions. It must be true to itself, logically transparent, and virginal of lies or trivialities.”

Walter Gropius, Architect

“To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.”

Le Corbusier, Architect

“To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history but to articulate it.”

Daniel Libeskind, Architect

“You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality.”

Walt Disney

“The designer has an obligation to provide an appropriate conceptual model for the way that the device works. It doesn't have to completely accurate but it has to be sufficiently accurate that it will help in both the learning of the operation and also dealing with novel situations.”

Don Norman, Interview by Avi Parush, Carlton University

“Before you can execute the design, you've got to live the design problem.”

“We're not trained to think about time in a systematic way, as a design dimension. But it's everything to the circadian system because it matters when you give users the light, not just whether it's blue or white. Design professionals are not real comfortable with thinking in the temporal dimension yet.”

Mariana Figueiro, Architect, Lighting Research Center

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof was to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

Douglas Adams

“Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.”

Charles Eames, Architect, Graphic and Industrial Designer, Filmmaker

“Fuck design, let's dance.”

Andre Toet

“You have to be interested in culture to design for it.”

Lorraine Wild, Graphic Designer, Pentagram

“Be culturally literate, because if you don't have any understanding of the world you live in and the culture you live in, you're not going to express anything to anybody else.”

Paula Scher, Graphic Designer, Pentagram

“Something must have form to be seen but must make sense to be understood and used.”

Klaus Krippendorff, Design Educator and Author

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

Douglas Adams, Novelist

“The more that a person brings to design, the better his or her ability to communicate.”

Michael Vanderbyl, Dean, California College of Arts and Crafts

“Simplicity and repose are qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.”

Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect

“If the client is a vacuum, you're not going to get great architecture, you're just going to get whatever you want to do. Great architecture requires debate and challenge. Think about Michelangelo and Pope Julius—they didn't get along that well!”

Ed Feiner, Chief Architect, General Services Administration

“I have no recipe for how to combine things. But you must be sincere. And if you are, strangely, it will succeed.”

Andree Putnam, Interior Designer

“Architecture has to be greater than just architecture. It has to address social values, as well as technical and aesthetic values. On top of that, the one true gift that an architect has is his or her imagination. We take something ordinary and elevate it to something extraordinary.”

Samuel Mockbee, Professor of Architecture, Auburn University

“Don't make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don't hesitate to make it beautiful.”

Shaker lesson

“The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.”

Joan Miro, Painter

“Our challenges for the future are the same as they have always been: Will our talents be used to divide or unite? For peace or for war? To replenish or deplete? Design brings emotion to a message. It takes an intellectual concept from the head into the heart. It is a powerful tool and, sadly, too often, a powerful weapon. As designers, we have incredible influence in shaping our cultural attitudes. We need to be more accountable for the selfish ways we use resources.”

Joshua Chen, Founder and Creative Director, Chen Design Associates

“Something that shapes our work as designers is personal experience. In my life I experience tremendous change, moving from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, from one person to the next, from advertising to design, my roles change every minute of the day. This minute I'm a friend, next minute I'll be a son. I can be an employer or an employee at the same time. Human experiences are multidimensional, and in my work I would like to reflect that.”

Tung Chiang, Principal, Ah Tung Design

“To creat one's world in any of the arts takes courage.”

Georgia O’Keefe, Painter

“Good ideas come from everywhere. It's more important to recognize a good idea than to author it.”

“To whom does design address itself: to the greatest number, to the specialist of an enlightened matter, to a privileged social class? Design addresses itself to the need.”

Charles Eames, Architect, Graphic and Industrial Designer, Filmmaker

“The recognition and understanding of the need was the primary condition of the creative act. When people feel they had to express themselves for originality for its own sake, that tends not to be creativity. Only when you get into the problem and the problem becomes clear, can creativity take over.”

Charles Eames, Architect, Graphic and Industrial Designer, Filmmaker

“What works good is better than what looks good. Because what works good lasts.”

Ray Eames, Architect, Graphic and Industrial Designer, Filmmaker

“All of the environment should express a higher, more-ordered, broadly-complete dedication to the well-designed.”

John Massey, Graphic Design Pioneer and Educator

“Sometimes my ideas do cross boundaries into other media. But you can't ever force it.”

J. Meejin Yoon, Architect, Sculptor and MIT Professor

“Most people think of eco-compatibility in terms of recycling. But even with recycling, the earth's resources aren't nearly sufficient to allow the bulk of the planet's population to consume at the levels we do in the developed world. If we are ever to allow the entire population to reach our standard of living, we have to learn to make do with less.”

Gabriele Centazzo, Founder and Designer, Valcucine

“I'm not a believer in putting designers off in an ivory tower. They need to have a voice at the table so they can identify where and why design can make a difference. We also need to understand the business issues. If we don't make our numbers this quarter, we don't earn the right to do something [cool] the next time.”

Chuck Jones, Vice President of Global Consumer Design, Whirlpool

“Make it like a sunflower.”

Steve Jobs, CEO, Apple, to Johnathan Ive, Vice President of Design, Apple, on previous version of iMac

“Design that moves others comes from issues that move you.”

Jennifer Morla, Principal, Morla Design

“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”

Eero Saarinen, Architect

On Design and Business

“Design must seduce, shape, and perhaps more importantly, evoke an emotional response.”

April Greiman

“Design acknowledges change. Its meaning encompasses change in our times. To design is to 'create order and to function according to a plan.' The notion of change and design move along the same path.”

Sara Little Turnbull, Director, Process of Change, Innovation and Design Laboratory, Stanford's Graduate School of Business

“Design can be both a manifestation of a company's design ethic and an outward communication of a company's design ethic and drive for excellence.”

Robert A. Lutz, Vice Chairman, Chrysler

“The most common misperception is the word 'design'. People think of primarily pretty pictures or forms. They don't understand the depth to which design goes—not only in products, but in every aspect of our life. Whether it is the design of a program, a product or some form of communication, we are living in a world that's totally designed. Somebody made a decision about everything. And it was a design decision.”

“It's important that design gets 'cooked' into the product at the start, whether you're talking about software, office space, or a web design. It's not an afterthought.”

Alan Webber, Founder, Fast Company magazine

“Design has allowed us to stand out; to look different and show that difference boldy.”

Joe Mansueto, Founder and Chairman, Morningstar

“Designer's derive their rewards from 'inner standards of excellence, from the intrinsic satisfaction of their tasks. They are committed to the task, not the job. To their standards, not their boss.' So whereas most people divide their lives between time spent earning money and time spent spending it, designers generally lead a seamless existence in which work and play are synonymous. As Milanese designer Richard Sapper put it: 'I never work—all the time.'”

Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, and Alan Fletcher

“Good design is good business.”

Thomas Watson, Jr., IBM

“Design must reflect the practical and aesthetic in business but above all... good design must primarily serve people.”

Thomas Watson, Jr., IBM

“There are three basic principles behind any well-designed product: truth, humanity, and simplicity.”

Sohrab Vossoughi, Founder and President, Ziba Design Inc.

“The details are details. They make the product. The connections, the connections, the connections. It will in the end be these details that give the product its life.”

Charles Eames, Architect, Graphic and Industrial Designer, Filmmaker

“It is not enough to have a talented designer; the management must be inspired too. The creative process is very disorganised; the production process has to be very rational.”

Bernard Arnault, Chairman and Owner, LVMH

“Design is that competitive advantage that sets a company apart in the global market. Within the global economy, the highest performing companies see design as a strategic asset. It becomes the core to their businesses. For those companies, design is more than aesthetics—it's competitive intellectual property.”

Monika Conway, Founder and Creative Director, Chalk Designstudio

“Design is the go-between. It is the interpreter of the intentions and ambitions of an organisation and the desires and needs (often hitherto unexposed) of the end user/recipient. Frequently companies have sound ideas, but they don't have the skills or experience—the creative wherewithal—to convert them into products and or services that are unique, prized and profitable.”

“Design, in terms of its relationship with business, should be seen as part of the business model. It should be understood and embraced by the company in general, and most certainly at Board level. From my perspective, I'm not interested in companies unless they have a strong attitude regarding the meaningfulness of their products in society. Ideally, a company will have a strong design-led ideology, because these are the companies—in my experience—that really have passion and integrity, and therefore perform.”

“(Design is) the bridge that brings the business strategy to life. It can build intangible brand value for a business, so the business is worth more. We all know that the intangible brand value of Coke far outweighs the value of its tangible assets.”

Geoff Suvalko, Creative Director and Partner, DesignWorksEIG

“My whole theory on authenticity is that there is a triangle: consumer, manufacturer, and designer. If there's no consumer, there's no market and therefore no reason to knock off creative property. If there's no manufacturer, there's no production run: You own a one-off Nakashima table, which is beautiful, but not what people like the Eameses, who designed for mass production, were after. Now, what happens if there's no designer in the triangle?”

Eames Demetrios (grandson of Charles Eames), Principal, Eames Office

“Coming from marketing design's kind of gone from a peripheral whatever to something I intellectually understood. But working this way has taken me... to a visceral understanding.”

“For a long time companies that wanted to shrink went to consultants for help. Consulting groups did a pretty good job in helping them. But the people who can tell you how to shrink are not the people who can tell you how to grow. They may be good at helping you to control the number but not at helping you to expand and create new ideas. For top-line growth, you have to sell something. For that you need design. Design innovation will provide the new products. Designers can tell you how to grow, how to innovate, how to change your culture.”

Bruce Nussbaum, Editorial Page Editor, Business Week

“I've been in this business for almost 30 years, and it's always been functionally organized. So where does design go? We want to design the purchasing experience—what we call the “first moment of truth”; we want to design every component of the product; and we want to design the communication experience and the user experience. I mean, it's all design. And I think that's been hard for people to come to grips with. I don't think anybody thinks we're not seriously in the design business. But it has taken time. Remember that one of the disciples had to put his hand in the bloody wounds to believe. We have some businesses that are doubting Thomases. We have other businesses that couldn't wait. Some got into it in a reasonably disciplined and strategic way with good results. Others sort of leaped into the middle of the lake and are having problems trying to go too fast. There are so many little things that can be so much better. The consumer can articulate what she doesn't like about [a product] sometimes, but she can almost never articulate what you need to do to remove the dissastisfier or to create delight. That's what we have to work on.”

A.G. Lafley, CEO, Procter & Gamble

On Design and Client Relations

“I wouldn't call it a retail store. It's a place where culture and commerce intersect. It's more like the Silk Road—a sense of exploration mixed with the exchange of things and ideas.”

Ron Pompei, Architect, on his design of the Anthropologie space

“Each client is a partnership, a conversation. You're only going to be able to go as far as they wish to go, in a way. ... That makes all the difference.”

Lindy Roy, Architect

On Design and Education

“Teachers of design should help a student to find their own voice. In other words, not be a templated version of the teacher, but rather to help them [the students] unfold what they already know and can bring to the table.”

April Greiman, Graphic Designer and Educator

“We believe that designers are professional comforters who bring relief. But we also believe that designers can be professional educators who teach prevention.”

Chris Chen, Instructor, Art Institute of Colorado

“We have to create an atmosphere and a space where students and teachers can do their most creative work. I compare it to being a film producer instead of a director. ... You produce a body of work ... by putting people, ingredients and stories together to make things happen. Education is invisible really. So you have to make certain intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual investments.”

Toshiko Mori, Architect

“The principle is that learning happens in all kinds of ways: through interacting with your peers, in formal classroom settings, and even ... when you're teaching others.”

From the article To Be Continued… by Aric Chen and Jonathan Ringen

On Design and Practice

“You explore concepts and things that interest you, but you are also exploring inside of yourself.”

Ed Paschke, Painter

“The task of the architectural project is to reveal, through the transformation of form, the essence of the surrounding context.”

V. Gregotti

“There's nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept.”

Ansel Adams, Photographer

“A spaceship is a delicately balanced environment. Every element taht doesn't contribute to the overall functioning of the system is by definition working against it. The same is true of our plant—our mothership—though sadly, most architecture today is slowly fatal to nature's systems.”

Constance Adams, Architect, NASA

“There is no such thing as a boring project. There are only boring executions.”

Irene Etzkorn

“I design for real people. I think of our customers all the time. There is no virtue whatsoever in creating clothing or accessories that are not practical.”

Giorgio Armani

“Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.”

Frank Gehry

“Architects are taught to privilege the visual and be seduced by images. But we live in all five of our senses.”

Hillary Brown, Architect, Office of Sustainable Design

“Given the rising need for responsive and humane environments, architects' tendency for self-expression cold result in the disintegration of the profession altogether, unless we rethink our role. T.S. Eliot urged poets to serve poetry by illustrating the capabilities of verse instead of their own personas. If places are to communicate fully through architecture, the architect must fade into the medium. Can we be selfless enough to silence our own voices?”

Lance Hosey, Metropolis magazine

“The idea that you make an experience that requires a conversation in a public place is training for the fact that culture is collective.”

Edwin Schlossberg, ESI

“Making a system easier to use for someone does not, for me, make that system better. You bring a 'user experience' to life by designing with people, not for them. Users create knowledge, but only if we let them.”

John Thackara, Doors of Perception

“Designers can create normalcy out of chaos; they can clearly communicate ideas through the organizing and manipulating of words and pictures.”

Jeffery Veen, The Art and Science of Web Design

“If you want to push design into new areas, you have to work closely across the boundaries of people's trades and professions. If you know the questions to ask, you can pull out the expertise.”

Jeanne Gang, Architect, Studio Gang/O'Donnell

“Too often we don't question whether celebrity status in design is a reward for good work. The combination of a well-known manufacturer and a big-name designer leads us to believe that a new product's utility has been well resolved. Whether you like it is, finally, an issue of taste.”

Tony Whitfield, Designer, Chair, Product Design Department, Parsons School of Design, New York

“We're asking architecture to take care of mixing people of different races and incomes who normally sort themselves out; we're asking it to do a lot. Our job is to make livable environments, but we can't erase racism by the way we design a building.”

Roberta Feldman, Professor, School of Architecture, University of Illinois Chicago

“Design works if it's authentic, inspired, and has a clear point of view. It can't be a collection of input.”

Ron Johnson, Senior Vice President of Retail, Apple

“One of the main criteria for the design of the everyday, though, is sensuality. Something that is sensual evokes a response that's not just visual or intellectual: It's suggestive.”

Deborah Berke, Principal, Deborah Berke Architect PC

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

Antoinè De Saint-Exupéry

“Architecture is not created by individuals. The genius sketch ... is a myth. Architecture is made by a team of committed people who work together, and in fact, success usually has more to do with dumb determination than with genius.”

Joshua Prince-Ramus, Partner, Office for Metropolitan Architecture

“When people say they don't understand design, it's because they don't get involved in the process.”

Tom Dair, Smart Design

“Traditions change. My grandmother would never have eaten soup out of a bowl; she would have insisted on a soup plate. Today we're more tolerant. If I change the shape of an object and it makes someone happy, that's reason enough.”

Alfredo Häberli, Designer, Responding to Why design another wineglass, another service set? Aren't there enough out there already?

On Design and Society

“Designs in connection with postage stamps and coinage may be described, I think, as the silent ambassadors on national taste.”

William Butler Yeats

“As we move into the 21st century, it becomes ever clearer that the ultimate, most intimate territory for design is not electronics, or interiors, or furniture, or the Web. It's us—our own living, breathing, biological selves. ... the personal makeover has become our most fundamental design task.”

Rick Poynor, Design Writer

“The new “stars” are nothing like the old masters of design. Whereas Loewy, Earl, Rams, Sottsass, and Sapper first delivered the goods, then became celebrities, today's so-called stars have mastered the art of selling personae rather than groundbreaking ideas. The focus has moved from mass-produced objects to boutique work.”

Gadi Amit, newdealdesign, LLC

“Architecture is an imposed art in some ways, imposed upon the public, so people must be sure about what you're doing. You have to be sure about what you're doing.”

Renzo Piano, Architect

“A lot of designers treat design as a route to stardom or a form of contemporary art. I am not anti those things, but how people use the thing is just as important.”

Tom Dixon, Creative Director, Habitat

“I feel quite oppressed by the furniture we have.”

Matali Crasset, Designer

“There's no reason for unhappiness if you're living with nice design.”

Isaac Mizrahi, Fashion Designer

“The body shape is a perfect small-scale exercise in spatial design, a testing ground for ideas and techniques to apply to buildings. Openings, folds, panelizing, pattern-making—the concepts and problems are much the same, whether it's a sleeve or a curtain wall.”

Elena Manferdini, Architect

“The essential element in design is always beauty. This is true in nature, in the architecture of trees. Trees invent a way to coexist and survive with other organisms through beauty.”

Gabriele Centazzo, Founder and Designer, Valcucine

“There is so much blandness and grayness out there, people want to be able to say “it's mine.” They want to customize their cars like they customize a jeans jacket.”

Neil Gershenfeld, Professor, M.I.T.

On Design and Technology

“You're as sensual as a pencil.”

Frank N. Furter, The Rocky Horror Picture Show

“Computers are to design as microwaves are to cooking.”

Milton Glaser, Graphic Designer

“Computers are stupid.”

Pablo Picasso

“Interactive designers spend most of their time with who aren't at all like them: technologists, information architects, strategists, producers and others. Promoting communication among these individuals is paramount, as is educating decision-makers in corporate and management positions about what interactive design is, and what it can do for business.”

Katherine Nelson, Editor-in-Chief, eDesign magazine

On Forecasting Design

“Increasingly, corporations will look to advertising agencies for direction. Without an understanding of brand creation, messaging, and strategy, today's designers are destined to become the haidressers of tomorrow's creative environments—great for styling but light on strategy.”

Harmutt Esslinger, Founder and CEO, FrogDesign Inc.

“Gone are the excesses of the '80s and the style-first approach of the '90s. In their place is an appreciation of everything that surrounds us and means something. We've recognized that in today's society of fear, we need mental comfort as much as physical comfort, and we're offering wit, irony, nostalgia, and imagery in everyday products. Charles Eames asked, “Whoever said that pleasure is not a function?””

Tovah Trace

On Good Design

“We interact with design on two levels: the physical and the emotional. We have a word for the physical part: ergonomics—what feels good to you. I call the emotional level “psychonomics”—what makes you feel good. The baseline of good design is a perfect balance of the two.”

“Good design, at least part of the time, includes the criterion of being direct in relation to the problem at hand—not obscure, trendy, or stylish. A new language, visual or verbal, must be couched in a language that is already understood.”

Ivan Chermayeff, Graphic Designer and Principal, Chermayeff & Geismar

“Good design is an act not an artifact. Good design can be achieved through resonance between various stakeholders.”

Uday Dandavate, Principal, SonicRim

“Good design should reflect a sense of human history—some aspect of where we've come from.”

Harmutt Esslinger, Founder and CEO, FrogDesign Inc.

“The good designer aims at a perfect fusion of the various considerations which enter into his design. He aims at an untortured unity—a direct whole. He arranges his levels consciously or subconsciously, adhearing to the requisites of the problem he is asked to solve or to his own inclination. Some designers see total act through a disc of aesthetic considerations—others, more practical minded, may put economic considerations at top level.”

“Good design is a form of respect—on the part of the producer for the person who will eventually spend hard-earned cash on the product, use the product, own the product.”

David Brown, Editor of Gain

“Good design today requires more vision (a larger point of view versus the single brilliant idea), more consistency (a deeper underlying structure of language and form versus the simple, uniform application of visual elements) and more patience (persistence over time versus creative authoritarianism).”

William Drenttel, Partner, Jessica Helfand/William Drenttel design

“Good design is a visual statement that maximizes the life goals of the people in a given culture (or, more realistically, the goals of a certain subset of people in the culture) that draws on a shared symbolic expression for the ordering of such goals.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Author of Flow

“When you feel the architecture just click, as though it couldn't have been anything else, it's due to a true understanding of the site and the plan and section.”

Stephen Kanner, Architect

“Good designers relentlessly generate lots of ideas and open-mindedly consider alternative solutions. At no time are good designers frightened to entertain a crazy, competing, or uncomfortable idea.”

Karl Ulrich, CEO, Nova Cruz Products

“I love the idea of slowness. It took thousands of years to come to the conclusion that we think of as a chair. Vitra moves fast in comparison to that, but I do think that every object has a natural evolutionary pace. If Charles Eames had said, “We have to finish it fast fast fast!” his chairs wouldn't be relevant a half-century later. I believe in getting things right. In our industry, you can't force something if you want it to be good. It has to become. Every object is a being with a soul. Our work is to find that soul. Sometimes we can't manage to find it, and we have to abandon the project or try again. We're not worried about being first to market, because what we do is unique by its very nature. Good design is relevant for decades; a year matters little on that scale.”

“Rather than overpowering nature or limiting human impact, good design will affirm the possibility of developing healthy and creatively interactive relationships between human settlements and the natural world.”

William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Buildings Like Trees, Cities Like Forests

“Good design is innovative Gives a product utility Is aesthetic Makes a product easy to understand Is unobtrusive Is honest Is long-lived Is consistent down to the smallest detail Protects the environment Good design is as little design as possible.”

Dieter Rams

“Good design is making something intelligible and memorable. Great design is making something memorable and meaningful.”

Dieter Rams

“The difference between good design and great design is intelligence.”

Tibor Kalman

“Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beautry to produce something that the world didn't know it was missing.”

Paola Antonelli

“Good designing is insightful. It's the insight that makes it happen.”

“Good design is probably 98% common sense. Above all, an object must function well and efficiently—and getting that part right requires a good deal of time and attention.”

Terence Conran, Founder and Chairman, Conran Holdings Ltd.

“We who are clay blended by the Master Potter, come from the kiln of Creation in many hues. How can people say one skin is colored, when each has its own coloration? What should it matter that one bowl is dark and the other pale, if each is of good design and serves its purpose well.”

Polingaysi Qoyawayma, Hopi

“Good design allows things to operate more efficiently, smoothly, and comfortably for the user. That's the real source of advantage. Businesses have started to understand this, so good design will become the price of entry. ... Customers appreciate good design. While they can't necessarily point out what specifically makes it good, they know it feels better. There's a visceral connection. They are willing to pay for it, if you give them a great experience.”

James P. Hackett, President and CEO, Steelase

“Great design isn't just what looks cool, it's a calculated and balanced blend of form and function that serves a specific purpose. Although, it's really satisfying when the end result looks cool.”

William Justice, Web Designer

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